Mac won't boot, blinking folder, Disk Utility only shows DVD drive

Question

A week after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, hibernation begins to falter. When I open the lid, I get the Spinning Beachball of Death and have to hold down the power button to restart.

Today when I do this, instead of the normal rEFIt boot menu between Mac and Windows (I use Boot Camp), rebooting only leads me to a blinking folder.

When I hold Option to boot from a specific partition, I get a blank screen.

When I hold Command+Option+P+R to reset the PROM, the chime does sound, but it does not fix the problem.

When I use an Ubuntu livecd, it runs successfully, but it does show this error while booting up:

ata1: COMRESET failed (errno:-32)

When I use a Mac OS X installation disc, Disc Utility does not display a hard drive, only the DVD drive. When I open Terminal.app and ran df -h, it only shows a 6 GB drive (the Mac installation disc) and a handful of virtual devices (200-300 KB each).

I hear no crunching noises to indicate the hard drive failed. Signs point to a dead hard drive, but I haven't seen any indications of a dying drive until today.

Solution 1

I took it to the Genius Bar. Evidently, a "hard drive bracket" inside the MacBook had to be replaced. The hard drive itself is fine.

Solution 2

I can't really discern a question, but it definitely sounds like your hard drive has died.

iFixit has handy repair tips for Macs which may be useful to you. Otherwise it's probably time for a trip to the Apple Store Genius Bar.

Good luck!

Solution 3

I've had more than one drive "fail silent" without a sufficiently horrible death as to generate an audible mechanical sign of failure. It seems pretty clear that this is probably a hard drive failure - if you have an external enclosure, you could use that to make sure its not the connections inside the machine.

If its in warranty, its time for a trip to your friendly Apple Authorized Service Provider, or the Apple Store. If it's not in warranty - well, sadly, its time to buy a new drive and find out how well your backup strategy works.

Comments

[mcandre]

I took it to an Apple Store Genius Bar and they ended up replacing a "hard drive bracket", some internal component that was damaged. It was fixed overnight. Me = Happy.

[Fomite]

@mcandre Excellent news. Some random part not working > total data loss. Which was my "fail silent" experience.